The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Twenty

  Traffic Jam

  “Phone... Call... Fluky...” I managed between gulped breaths. Mitty looked at me through the smoke of his Jefferson. I had barged past him, into the old sun porch.

  “The phone is in there,” he indicated towards the house itself and the old back door. “I'm reticent to use it, outside of an emergency. What's wrong?”

  “Sophie,” I panted.

  “Your sister? Little Bean? Is she all right?”

  “Traitor.” My wind was beginning to return. “Sold us out to the Concession, gave up Zimmerman's garage.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “Stupidly told her about The Cordwainer, in Pottersville. All ready to go. Now it's just a matter of time...”

  “Yes, told her The Cordwainer was ready for testing – it's her honor after all.” Mitty wasn't understanding. “Quite a piece of craftsmanship, if I do say so my-”

  “No, no!” I grabbed Mitty by the lapels of his dirty dressing gown. “You don't understand. It was Sophie! Sophie! The Concession goons, in the black car. At Zimmerman's... That night at Putter's... She tipped them off. Now they'll know about Pottersville, they'll be on their way! If they find the train, they'll find everything: The shoes, the tankers, the peroxide. Everything we stole. We're not just going to lose our jobs, Mitty, we're going to go to jail!”

  “Sophie? No, she built us an engine...” Mitty couldn't fathom what I was saying. I could hardly blame him, it was ostensibly insane.

  “I know, I know!” I raised a hand in surrender. “You've just got to understand that the whole game has been blown. We need to call Fluky, make sure he knows that the black-suits are gunning for him.”

  Mitty's expression shifted slowly from confusion to terror. He took the cigarette holder from his lips and said gravely, “What are we going to do?”

  “We're going to get The Cordwainer out of here,” I replied.

  “To where?”

  “To where?” I parroted in disbelief. “To where? The Big City, of course!”

  As Mitty vanished into the house proper to make the call, I rummaged around amongst Mitty's possessions looking for anything of use. A bundle of dirty blankets, some canned food, and three quarts of McTavish was all I could muster.

  Up until that point, I realized as I attempted to collect anything of Mitty's of value, I had been thinking of Mitty's Plan as an expedition we would undertake over the mountains to the Big City and back. The permanent nature of our exodus from Boot Hill however, at that moment, dawned on me. We would never be coming back. There was nothing left in Boot Hill for any of us now except charges in front of a circuit judge on multiple counts of grand larceny. I would never work another day at The Shop; Fluky's days working for Old Man Zimmerman were over. We would either escape that night from Boot Hill aboard The Cordwainer or we'd wake up tomorrow in a jail cell.

  We weren't ready – we just weren't ready.

  The fact that we hadn't tested Sophie's engine was separate and apart. We had prepared no supplies. No food or water or bedding or clothing. The departure of The Cordwainer had seemed remote and distant. There had seemed no need to lay on provisions. But now the departure was imminent and we would have to satisfy ourselves with whatever we had at hand.

  Mitty returned from the filth and squalor of his mother's house to inform me that Fluky wasn't home. That could only mean that he was in Pottersville, tinkering away at the train. That would mean his truck would be down there, too. We'd have to make the trip on foot. Would there be enough time? If the Concession goons came in their low, black cars, they might beat us to old Union Station. If they set eyes on what we'd accomplished, there'd be no hiding anything. The Cordwainer was just sitting ready at the platform at the station, loaded with cargo. Mitty and I would have to beat them down the hill and into the old ghost town. There was no reason to believe that Sophie had placed a call exactly the second I'd run out her back door. Perhaps something I had said might have moved her, given her pause. I couldn't count on that charity, however, and I rushed Mitty to dress and collect up what things he felt he would need for the journey.

  “Do you want to say good-bye?” I asked, once we'd collected up what sacks and bags full of provisions we could find. I pointed back towards the house, into Mitty's mother's home.

  “No,” Mitty said without emotion. “Did you?” he asked.

  “No,” I had to admit. If there had only been time.

  On the large, old dining room table Mitty's figurines were still positioned, ready for battle.

  “Don't you want to take those?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “We won't be coming back.”

  “I know.”

  And we left by the makeshift, plywood door.

  Down the hillside, down C Street, into Pottersville I jogged, with Mitty puffing away behind me. As we neared the Union Station we became aware that the work lights we had rigged up were burning away inside the station. Fluky's truck was parked outside. Mitty and I came storming across the concourse, out onto the platform lit by the bare, yellow incandescent lights Fluky had strung up to a utility pole outside. Fluky had a cowling off something on the engine and was leaning forward, almost completely consumed by the machine. When he heard our approach, he gingerly pulled himself vertical and started to wipe grease off his hands onto this shirt.

  “Think I found that there voltage blip in the-” he paused when he saw the load we were carrying. “Plannin' a camp out?” he chuckled.

  “The guns, Fluky, where are the guns?” I said ominously.

  Fluky stopped laughing. He didn't say another word, understanding the tone and manner of my request. He turned and walked the full length of The Cordwainer, to the caboose he had built out of an old woody, 1940 station wagon. He reached through the window and came back up with the sack of guns. He returned and handed it over to me.

  I fished around and found the best of the three revolvers. Into this, I loaded the two cartridges – both the healthy and the heavily corroded one. I swung the cylinder closed and held the gun in front of me, feeling the weight.

  “Shee-it, you're finally gonna put Mitty outa his misery...” Fluky joked, but he did not laugh. It took someone like Fluky to joke at a moment like that. I tucked the pistol away into the belt of my pants.

  “We leave in twenty minutes,” I commanded.

  Mitty didn't comment, he simply went about picking up our sacks and loading them into the rear of the caboose.

  “Wha-what?” Fluky asked, watching Mitty. “You're jokin', right?”

  “The Cordwainer departs now, or she'll never depart at all,” I said.

  “But, but, but, we ain't even tested the engine.”

  “I know.”

  “Remember what happen' to the first one?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I sure as hell don't wanta be on that thing when this one pops...”

  “We don't have a choice, Fluky.” I started to move along the train, checking on the freight cars, testing the hoppers for sturdiness.

  “What the hell's happened that now you're in such a hellfire rush?”

  “The Concession goons – the black-suits – they know about The Cordwainer.”

  “What? How'd they know that?”

  “Sophie told 'em,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “Sophie? Li'l Bean? Why'd she tell 'em?” Fluky was following me, trying to understand.

  “It's hard to explain,” was all I said. “But she told them about Zimmerman's. If she'd known we'd moved the train here, the game would already be up.”

  “Li'l Bean?”

  Fluky paused to let that news sink in.

  I was satisfied with what I saw. There was no faulting Fluky's craftsmanship. He'd built a train – an honest to goodness freight hauling machine, out of nothing but scrap car parts and loose steel. I gave the caboose a quick once over. It was quite plush. I hadn't realize what care Fluky had put into its constru
ction. The back seat was pushed back, almost to the rear doors, and the front bench seat was turned around to face backwards. There was a low table of plywood at about window height between them. It had all the feel of a comfortable restaurant booth, like one at Putter's. I'd later come to discover the table latched down, level with the benches, to form a sleeping surface, and the engine compartment – now lacking its engine – contained a small kitchenette setup and supplies. Fluky, it seems, had just about thought of everything. Thank God for all of us he was always so prepared, thinking ahead. If we'd had to make our odyssey across the mountains with just the tinned beans and whiskey I'd been able to scavenge at Mitty's...

  “Surely we got a little time, I got the voltage regulator all-”

  “No,” I said, looking at Barry's watch. “We've got fifteen minutes.”

  “Shee-it, it'll take me two hours to get this here regulator back together!” Fluky sprinted off towards the engine.

  “Well, you got fifteen minutes!” I yelled after him.

  Of course, I had no idea how much time we actually had. It was a good thing too, because it would take us almost an hour before The Cordwainer was even starting to look like it was ready to move. We drained the last of the diesel fuel from Fluky's truck and transferred it to a baby tank that sat next to the mother peroxide tank on the engine car. We passed over the whole length of the train and greased every joint and every axle we could possibly grease. There was no avoiding the cold hard fact that The Cordwainer was as ready as she'd ever be to make her journey. And time was running out.

  By the end of the hour, we took a moment to familiarize ourselves with her controls. Fluky and I sat in the cockpit of the engine, looking over the panels that Fluky had rigged up. She was going to be an embarrassingly easy machine to operate, despite the technical brilliance required for her construction. There was a twist value, which controlled the flow of peroxide out of the tank and into the expansion chamber. Next to it was a fuel temperature gauge with a strip of red tape stuck to it indicating the temperature it was critical to keep the engine beneath. On another panel was a switch, two ammeters either side of a knob, hooked to a potentiometer that regulated the power output to the traction motors on each car.

  On a third panel, set apart from everything else, was a tantalizing red button. I had to restrain myself from automatically pushing it the second I sat down in the cockpit. “What's this?” I interrupted Fluky when he was only halfway through explaining the potentiometer to me.

  “The diesel injectors,” he replied, trying to draw my attention back to the amperage knob.

  “Diesel injectors?”

  “Yeah, remember? Li'l Bean's schematic. That shoots the diesel directly into the turbine. Boom! Boost of juice. But you got to keep an eye on the temperature gauge here, and not use too much, or you can scrap the whole engine.”

  “Why'd you have to make it red?” I asked, fingering the button.

  “I don't know, seemed appropriate somehow...”

  Mitty came alongside the engine and lifted his bulk up onto the running board, sticking his face into the cockpit. “I've done a thorough inventory of our supplies,” he said. “Six cans of beans, ten cans of stew, five gallons of water, two boxes of salted crackers, a box of Tom Mixx, three quarts of McTavish, and a carton of Jefferson's. How long are we expecting this trip to take us?”

  Fluky and I looked at each other. The thought had never occurred to me. We hadn't even plotted out a route, we were that unprepared.

  “Two, three days...” I wildly guessed.

  “Then we'll need more Jefferson's,” Mitty said authoritatively, dropping down off the running board.

  Eventually the moment came when we could stall no longer and the engine of The Cordwainer had to be started. The evening had rolled on into early night, and I was confident that my sister would have by then informed the Concession men – and perhaps even Deputy Aesop – of the location of our unlawful, capitalist enterprise.

  The honor of first attempting to start The Cordwainer fell to me. After our first attempt to test run a hydrogen peroxide engine had ended in a mushroom cloud, Fluky and Mitty were understandably disinterested at being near our second attempt to do the same. And for this attempt, we had over a thousand gallons of peroxide sitting in a tank not four feet from the expansion chamber, and almost sixty gallons of diesel fuel, too.

  Fluky and Mitty found cover in the archway leading to the concourse. I doubted, if the whole affair exploded, that such slim cover would have done them much good. An explosion of that magnitude would easily bring down the whole Union Station and the buildings for a few blocks in all directions.

  God, it was times like that I wished I was a praying man.

  As my hand reached out for the fuel valve, trembling with anticipation, Fluky's voice came echoing through the station, “Wait!” I almost leapt out of my skin. I frantically looked over the controls, out across the engine, to locate the emergency. Fluky came sprinting up and hopped up onto the running board beside the cockpit. He reached in and slammed something down hard onto the top of the control panel. When his arm pulled away, I could see that it was the googly-eyed Jesus, in all his egg-shaped glory. “For luck,” Fluky said and gave the Jesus a flip. It was still bobbling back and forth as I reached for the fuel valve again, turning it slowly on.

  Nothing happened.

  The large flywheel, which bisected the axis of the turbine/generator combination, didn't budge. I was getting zero readings on both ammeters, north and south of the potentiometer.

  The engine didn't work.

  “Nothing!” I yelled back along the length of the train. The googly-eyed Jesus was just finishing its oscillations. It stared at me, disapprovingly. Fluky and Mitty emerged from cover, hesitant to approach. My mind was racing with all the potential faults there could be in such a complicated system. Vacuum lock in the fuel line... Perhaps the peroxide was pooling in the expansion chamber, not touching the catalyst. Maybe I'd overdone it with the ammonia – could you make hydrogen peroxide too stable? Perhaps the turbine was jammed – no, that'd just explode...

  “Turn the dingus!” Fluky yelled along the full length of the platform.

  “Dingus?” I yelled back. Which dingus? The damn train was ten thousand dinguses all bolted together.

  “The flywheel!” Fluky specified.

  “The what?”

  “Flywheel?”

  “Why?”

  I could hear Fluky's exasperated grunt down the full length of the platform.

  He came running up, “You ain't gettin' no fuel into the expansion chamber. The fuel pump, it's just a dealie on the turbine. Got to get the whole thing spinnin' to pump fuel.”

  “What? The fuel pump's where?” I asked, confused.

  “Ah, hell...” Fluky pulled himself up onto the running board of the engine, shimmied along, then climbed up onto the cowling, straddling the turbine. He took the flywheel in both hands and gave it a shove clockwise. It spun for perhaps a quarter turn and came to a halt. “You sure that valve's open?” he yelled back.

  “Quarter turn!”

  “Open her up full!” he instructed, and I did as I was told. Again, Fluky got a grip on the flywheel and pulled it around with all his might. This time it went a full turn before it began to slow. Then, deep down underneath me, there was a sound not unlike an animal awaking. The whole engine palpably lurched as the flywheel began to pick up speed.

  Fluky didn't wait around. With unexpected grace, he leapt free of the engine cowling, landed on the platform, did a half roll, and sprinted away. A soon as the flywheel began to pick up pace, a stream of steam began to shoot out of the long, tall exhaust pipe above the engine.

  We had power!

  I looked down at the gauges and could see electric potential north of the potentiometer. Three hundred amps and climbing. The temperature in the turbine was climbing too, and I backed off on the fuel valve, turning it down a quarter turn. The amps hovered just below three hun
dred, and so did the temperature at six hundred degrees.

  It was working. The fucking thing worked! I was flabbergasted. I watched the flywheel spin on its axle for a whole minute, waiting for something to go wrong. But there was nothing. I marveled at how remarkably quiet the engine ran. After becoming accustomed to the noise of Fluky's wrecking truck, the comparatively silent grace of Sophie's engine came as a pleasant surprise. Cautiously, I reached down and turned the potentiometer ever so slightly.

  The whole train lurched suddenly forward.

  I cut out the voltage as suddenly as I started it, and the whole train lurched to a halt. Everything shook – the boots in their hoppers, the links between the cars, the cockpit I was sitting in – I almost fell forward over the controls. She had some pep, I realized, and straightened myself back up in my seat. I attempted to turn the potentiometer again. Again, she started moving forward, but this time I did it with a little finesse. I turned the knob, barely five degrees around its full sweep, and The Cordwainer slowly began to roll forward along the tracks.

  All aboard, I said to myself in my head, feeling like an old time engineer. The Nine Fifteen, leaving for Seattle, stops in Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego! Then I remembered, standing up and leaning out of the cockpit, not everyone was actually aboard.

  “All aboard!” I yelled back down the platform.

  Fluky had never made it back to cover – he had paused, halfway down the platform to watch The Cordwainer take its first breath. Mitty, however, came sprinting out of the concourse archway. The train wasn't moving much over two miles an hour, but for Mitty that was quite a serious sprint. Both Mitty and Fluky, at the last minute, leapt onto the running board of the station wagon caboose. Mitty almost tumbled, but Fluky caught his arm.

  We didn't make it two hundred yards before the engine car derailed.

  It was at the crossing, where C Street came across the tracks. I think the front crossbar was mis-configured, running too low, and the front wheels popped clear of the tracks. I flicked the switch next to the potentiometers and the whole train shuddered to a halt. I was down out of the cockpit as Fluky and Mitty came running up the side of the train. We stood in the dark looking at the wheels of the engine car sitting tangential to the tracks.

  “Ah, shit...” I said looking down, my heart sinking in my chest. So close, but yet so far from success.

  “Don't worry, I gotta plan!” Fluky said confidently, then hopped up onto the engine and began cranking the crossbar up and then extending it out. I was bewildered, I had not yet seen the technical genius of Fluky's crossbar guides in action. As he cranked the front bar down over the tracks again, the front wheel lifted up in the air, weight of the engine and all.

  “Get the block and tackle from the caboose,” Fluky called to me. “It's in the back.”

  I sprinted to the back of The Cordwainer, opened up the rear doors of the station wagon, and pulled out a heavy duty block and tackle and a length of rope that were stowed under the rear bench. I was carrying it all back to the engine when I saw the first pair of headlights crest the hill at the top of C Street.

  I had the perfect vantage point to see all the way up the long, straight road – all the way through old Pottersville and up the hill to where Mitty's house sat at the crest. A pair of headlights lit up the clouds momentarily, then swept down, lighting up the grade down the hill. My stomach almost leapt out my mouth.

  What did emerge was, “They're coming!”

  Mitty and Fluky popped up like prairie dogs from inside The Cordwainer's engine. “What do I do with this?” I asked, holding up the block and tackle.

  “Tie it to the sign post,” Fluky pointed to the “Railroad Crossing” at the edge of the road on the opposite side of the train than she had derailed on. I tied one end of the tackle to the sign post and hooked the other end to the chassis of the engine. I was straightening out ropes when I risked another glance up the hill.

  There were a lot of lights up there now.

  I went back to my ropes, thinking little of it, rushing to get the train back on the tracks. But the full implications of what I had just seen began to dawn on me. I paused and looked back up C again. There were far more that two pairs of headlights at the crest of the hill, so many they were starting to blur together. They were like moving spotlights in the darkness, dancing back and forth up against the abandoned Victorian homes flanking the street.

  At the time I didn't understand – had no way to know – but I would later come to learn that the first automobiles that crested the hill between Boot Hill and Pottersville were not the two low black cars of the Concession goons. When Sophie had raised the alarm, after I'd fled from her kitchen, she'd attempted to put in a call to the Concession men about the location of The Cordwainer by calling Deputy Aesop, who that evening had been having dinner at Putter's. He'd taken the call calmly, promising her that he'd relay the message, and then he'd sat down again to finish his supper.

  Now, Deputy Aesop was never one for keeping a secret, and he'd proceeded to explain to most everyone in the restaurant exactly what Fluky, Mitty and I had been up to over in Pottersville.

  Turns out, Mitty's Plan was one of the poorest kept secrets in history.

  It's not like it's easy to keep a secret in a town like Boot Hill. Most everyone knows most everyone else's business, like it or not. Apparently, the trials and tribulations of our attempt to construct a train for hauling boots were well known to the community. Word was there was even a pool going on our chances of success.

  Mitty had been of no help. After one or two drinks in the bar at Putter's, he'd start telling everyone about how he was going to be rich when he came back from the Big City – what he was going to buy and how he was going to live. One or two drinks more and he'd give up most every detail of everything he was privy to. Which was most everything.

  When then Concession men had come to town to break up the unionization, the rumors of the illicit railroad had kept them snooping around. It had been only the natural reticence of the community to cooperate with authority that kept the Concession goons from marching directly into Old Zimmerman's workshop and discovering our train. Most everyone in town was aware, to one extent or another, of what we were up to late at night in the junkyard. And when the news broke that The Cordwainer was finally ready to roll, and that the Concession men were racing to Pottersville to shut the whole operation down. the town of Boot Hill did the most miraculous thing.

  They created the first traffic jam Boot Hill had seen in thirty years.

  Out of old garages and sheds, a whole fleet of vehicles emerged. Some running off whiffs of gasoline, jealously horded for decades; others converted to run on alcohol, or rigged with electric motors. It turns out that Fluky, Mitty and myself were not the only gearheads in Boot Hill. A dozen, two dozen, two score other projects like ours were all being worked on in parallel to The Cordwainer. Not trains, of course, but restorations of classic cars – conversions to alternate power sources.

  There were enough cars in Boot Hill to jam C Street all the way up the hill, past Mitty's house and down the other side. When the Concession men got word from Deputy Aesop about our train, they had attempted to make all haste over to Pottersville to shut us down. But they hadn't made it any further than C Street, as cars pulled out into the road in front of them, blocking their path. Horns were honked and responded to with horns that hadn't sounded in twenty years.

  The traffic jam would not slow the Concession men down for long, but it bought Fluky, Mitty and myself enough time to man the block and tackle, pull on the ropes and slide The Cordwainer's engine back onto its tracks.

  If I'd only known at the time what the town of Boot Hill had done for us. But it wouldn't be until many years later that I'd learn the whole story. The fact was the odyssey of The Cordwainer would have ended before it had even begun if it had not been for the people of Boot Hill.

  Fluky made some minute adjustments, taking some measurements under the chassis, mak
ing sure it wouldn't derail again. The lights at the top of the hill started to break up, separate and stream down the hill. I was already in the cockpit when Fluky finally pulled himself up onto the running board.

  “My turn,” he said, climbing up into the cockpit.

  “What?”

  “My turn to drive. You've cocked it up once already.”

  “You're blaming me for that?” I laughed, making room for Fluky, letting him get into the engineer's chair.

  “Hell, yeah,” he said, tuning the potentiometer to zero, flicking the switch back to on, and slowly dialing up the speed again.

  We were rolling again as I climbed out onto the running boards that stretched the full length of the train, along the side of each freight car. Our lights in the Union Station were receding into the darkness behind us as the strobing clutch of headlights came dancing down the hill and intersected with the tracks. I couldn't make out in the distance exactly what transpired when the Concession goons finally reached the Union Station. But by the dancing headlights over the roofs of the building and the occasional horn echoing out through the empty streets of Pottersville, it sounded like an awkward scrummage of cars and people were frustrating the Concession men's attempts to give chase.

  I shimmied along until I was at the station wagon caboose, and I swung in through one of the open windows. Mitty was sitting at the table looking at a map with a pen light in one hand. He looked up as I sat down on the bench across from him. I smiled a smile at him I think will still be plastered to my face a year after I'm dead.

  “Now,” Mitty said, tapping the map with the pen light. “Where does this train take us again?”